Based on four and a half years of participant-observation field research and focused interviews with men and women child care workers, the author examines the occupational processes of the entry and tenure of workers, paying particular attention to gender as it manifests in the meanings and actions involved in becoming and continuing as a child care worker. As men and women workers go about the business of becoming and being child care workers, they become active agents in the reproduction of child care as low-wage, low-status, women's work. Through the construction of particular gendered "accounts" and "vocabularies of motive", workers play a key role in sustaining the status of child care as a gendered occupation.